“A River Called Titas”

By Emdadul Hoque Topu

“A River Called Titas” is based on the autobiographical novel by Advaita Malla Barman.
The Writer himself came from fisherman family. Locally these fisherman community is
known as “Malo.” As a result, the struggle life of these fishermen community had been
observed and felt by Barman from a realistic perspective. His novel was published in
1956,and in 1936 another novel called “Padma Nadir Majhi” (Boatman of the River
Padma) by Manik Bandopadhyay was published: both of them are about the ethnic-
social group who live in the river bank. In between “Boatman of the River Padma” and
“A River Called Titas,” there was no book on these ethnic-social group, the Malo
community. Though Manik observes this community as an outsider, he tried to build the
biosphere of this endangered society. In contrast, Barman’s origins as a Malo, helped
him to observe, realize the struggle of this lower caste community, which leads him to
write about them thoroughly. And when this novel was publishedin1956, the writer was
passed away,and after two decades, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak captures the river called
Titas on celluloid.
As media film and literature has enormous differences and Ritwik has to break down the
novel into too few different parts to bring out the central gesture of the story and build a
unique form of narration. Following this, for better analysis of “A River Called Titas,” I
haveplannedto separate this whole cinema into four major episodes. Reasons are
many,but I concentrate on how Ritwik tried to create the Verfremdungseffekt 1 or the
alienation effect. His engaging editing style and the narrative style is more episodic, and
it strongly follows Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre 2 than dramatic theatre. So the cinema
mainly structured from four points of view, with the first part focused on its narrative
development. The beginning title sequence tires to develop a narrative, visual structure
of the village, its villagers and the Titas river, introducing the main characters from the
1
Means distancing effect which is a technique that used in theater and cinema to prevents the audience from losing
itself completely in the plot or characters.

2
Epic theatre are divided by based on a structure, staging, design, music, acting, and characters of a production.
Where dramatic theatre has a plot or story, and it implicates spectators in actions and down into the plot; allow its
audience to have emotions and where feelings are more preserved; suspense about the outcome of the story and
one scene exists for another; linear development of the sequences and thought determines to exist, on the contrary,
epic theatre does not follow these characteristics. Epic theatre is performed with narration which is remind the
aidance that they are watching a presentation of a story. The characters in epic theatre sometimes break the
sequence by commenting upon their character as an actor and sometimes speaking to the stage direction. It turns the
spectator into observer but awakens his capacity for action and demands decisions from the event. This is more
episodic and disconnected montage of scenes, and each scene exists for itself. An additional piece of written
information might present onstage like as a placard, multimedia or a powerpoint slideshow can be used for alienation
effect. It also breaks the imaginary wall between the actors and audience and they become the active audience of the
theatrical experience as they are kept thinking all the time of not turning off. This term is also known as breaking the
fourth wall.
villagers, young Basanti, Basanti’s mother, Kishore, Subol, Ramprashad and RajarJhi.
This episode starts with Basanti’s mother (acted by Rawshan Jamil), young Basanti and
young Kishore and Subol through a ritual named “Maghmandal.” Where young Basanti
wears a new sari, sitting with Kishore and Subol, while her mother gives puffed rice to
them; after which Basanti will go to Titas river to sail a small toy boat and Kishore, Subol
will have to try to catch the boat and then she will take a bath in the river after that she
will clean the courtyard and draw Alpona there. The tradition is a village ritual where
children playfully find their life partner. And the episodes end with a particular break
when Kishore become a mad person after getting married to a girl from another village,
RajarJhi, and losing her to a group of river pirates.

The second episodes are about the return of Kishore’s lost wife RajarJhi, his son
Ananto and subsequent friendship with Basanti. This part of the movie develops the
symbolic figure of a ritual character named “Ma Bhogoboti” the mother Goddess figure
from Hindu religion. Here Ananto's mother,RajarJhi (acted by Kabori Sarwar) is
represented as the mother Goddess figure. Besides, it also focuses on the bonding of
the Malo community, where the rules of the play the most iconic figure along with the
equal rights of man and women in the society also become a prominent figure. “What
does the society say?” the question came to the front to solve every problem and the
unwritten law of the living tradition answer every conservativefigure. After Ananto’s
parent's death, Basanti becomes his mother and a strong emotional bonding develops
between them, which ends with a tragic detachment of Ananto and Basanti. The third
part of the movie introduces the upper caste bourgeois rulers and the colonial culture
which helps these orthodox rulers to rule over this ethnic-social group. And Basanti and
Ramprashad present as a figure of stand against all these irregularities. And the last
part of the film details, how as a consequence, there is the inevitable destruction of a
society at the hands of the bourgeois upper caste rulers and colonialism, which start
taking control over the Malo community by using their power and force. Besides, the
river Titas dries up, and with the river, the Malo villagers also collapse. They become
jobless, vagabonds and beggars. And provides an essential message about how the life
and civilization never stop evolving: with the death of Basanti, a child run between a
paddy field which is somewhere in the land of Titash.

According to Moinak Biswas, in his “Her Mother’s son Kingship and History in Ritwik
Ghatak” article, in “Ajantrik” (1950), mainly two-things became focused in this film,
organic life and mechanical life. The pre-social bond between the hero Bimal and his old
car, Jagaddal: where the taxi driver Bimal’s car Jagaddal has a mystical power to act
like a human being, in case it can only communicate with Bimal. Ajantrik tries to query
the connection between a man and a machine, an old machine which has lots of
memories with the man, and the crisis between them which leads into a tragic end. The
most significant point to be noted from the film is Ghatak’s distance from the familiar
forms and feelings. When Indian melodrama has been negotiating a conflict between
materialism and conjugality for decades, Ghatak appears with a completely different
example of couple formation which shows the brother-sister bond, here the machine is
the more symbolic figure, rather than bond with the motherliness or husband-wife
relationship. Even in his next film Nagarik (1953) the narration of traditional forms of a
relationship between a man and women has been briefed in an unfamiliar way. The
relationship between Ramu and his beloved Uma has been present with utmost
reluctance, where the real emotional bonding exists between Ramu and his sister Sita.
More significantly, the same intensive gestures appear in Ramu and his sister Sita as
between Ramu and Uma. Characteristically in Ghatak, names are never without
symbolical meaning: here Ram and Sita re-present the perfect couple from the
Ramayana. As well as in his other two films Runaway (Bari there Paliye, 1959) and
Subarnarekha (1965) the consistent obsession with mother archetype lead his narration
to brother and sister as the primary basis of love. For example, in Subarnarekha the
early incarnations of lovers shadows the brother-sister relationship of young Abhiram
and Sita, whereas in Runaway there is an attraction between Kanchan and Mini. More
prominently, when Ghatak applies this in The Cloud-Capped Star film, Nita and her
elder brother Shankar create an island of happiness and belonging in the turbulent
waters of the refugee home. Together they devise the means to tackle the daily
humiliation of the artist and the dreamer.

In this film, Ritwik tries to portray a ‘timeless land’ where nothing is everlasting. Which is
also a significant style of his movies. The slow, painful deterioration of places,
communities, personal relationships as they separate, wander, devolve into madness:
all these things get an epic narrative form in his films. And all these matters are
reflected in his River Called Titas. The film is not focused on developing nostalgias or
sentimental emotions,but it is very much dedicated to revealing the reality of constant
change on both personal and social level. Which reminds its viewer to compare their
real-life situation with the experience of the historical trauma they have experienced in
the past or heard from their ancestors.

“It all comes and then disappears again. There is a spark of life,and suddenly it is not
there. It all becomes untraceable. You were a child yesterday; today you are women.
The ever-flowing river Titas may become bone dry tomorrow. It may not even have the
last drop, without which our soul cannot depart. Yey these flocks of sails move on and
on and on….” Ramprashad is telling about this timeless land and uncertain future to his
daughter like young Basanti.

Ramprashad, an essential character from this film, a farmer not from this Malo
community, has this conversation with young Basanti, who always reminds him of his
daughter, Durga. Here, in a symbolic narrative structure, this character warns about the
timeless and uncertain law of nature, how it changes everything through the periods of
time. And also gives a hint to the audience that, maybe one day this river will get dry but
that the movement of civilizations will never stop evolving, it will keep floating just as
these flocks of sails move on and on.The very first episodes of the film are built around
an original structure which produces an inevitable loss and shock to the narrative.The
movie starts with a Baul song, a devotional musical genre of this land. The lyrics of the
song are about the mystical nature of the river and the uncertain lives that it threads
through. The words mainly play with three symbolic elements here, ‘River’, ‘Boat and
‘Human Life’ - comparing life to these mythical elements - where the other side of the
river is always mystical, uncertain, with a boat the only vehicle to go across. As the story
begins with Basanti and her childhood friends Kishore and Subol playing in the
Maghmandal ritual, Ghatak shows us how the land itself accepts the development of
the romantic relationship between two children via a ritual tradition. As always in
Ghatak, love always seems to begin from a brother and sister relationship and the
indeterminacy of childhood intimacies more than develop along the trajectory of mother-
child or regular romantic conjugality. Anyway, one of the important sequences of the
movie is the marriage of Kishore and RajrJhi, an unknown girl from another village, who
is never called by any real name. Here Ghatak choreographs the marriage sequence in
the most elliptical way. Besides their poverty would never allow his characters to get
married maintaining all the religious rules. As he is against the religious style of the
marriage ceremony; in most of his films, he avoids showing religious rituals, using
instead a primitive, folk iconography of marriage as an intensive meeting of two souls
and bodies. Ghatak uses symbolic background music which are popular folk wedding
songs in village society. Here he uses “Beloved bride, How shall I adore you?” a popular
song of marriage ceremonies in Bengali folk culture. Instead of a commitment to gods.
his character promise to each other and to the society about being together. The
physical intimacy of the married couple in Titas is structured via an energetic montage
sequence stressing on fertility: a sudden eruption of deep emotional intensities as the
couple consummate their relationship. At the end of this episode, Kishore loses his wife
when the river pirates try to abduct RajarJhi; she evades them and jumps into the river.
As Kishore becomes mad from the sudden loss of his wife, his friend Tilokchand (acted
by Ghatak himself) delivers the damning dialogue (“Kishore has gone mad”) directly to
the audience, breaking the fourth wall - thereby following the epic theatrical
performance style,. Here we come back again to Ramprashad’s philosophical dialog
with young Basanti about the uncertainty about life: a thematic that continues
throughout the development of the film’s narrative.

E-Flat (Komal Gandhar, 1961) is the only film by Ghatak where romantic love is at the
center of his narrative style. In this film, Ghatak tried to reproduce his autobiography as
a theatre activist and playwright. Here for the first time, he spoke about the partition of
1947 and how his land became a foreign land. For Ritwik a marriage and love is always
depersonalized through ritual enactment and the use of traditional marriage song,
whether they are favorite folk songs or religious devotional songs about the separation
of a girl from her family, which is a more mythical representation of reality. At the end of
the film, Anasuya and Bhrigu stand close to the railway tracks joining hands in a gesture
reminiscent of the wedding ritual. Same as in “Meghe Dhaka Tara” the marriage ritual
has been avoided intentionally by Ghatak.

“After death, the mother becomes an enemy. She no longer remains a birth mother.
She becomes an enemy. She tries to take her child with her; her spirit wanders
everywhere to back her child” - a conversation between Basanti and Ananto.

Basanti is telling young Ananto about how death comes back to the child’s dream and
imagination, just like his mother is appearing in his dream to take him back with her.
Here a childless mother figure is trying after his mother’s death to hold on to her friend
(RajarJhi), impelling her to take the place of his mother. The emotions of a childless
mother figure get a narrative form through a mythical belief. However, Kumar Shahani
writes about fertility females principles in Ghatak’s film ‘A River Called Titas” in his “The
passion of a Resurrected Spring” article. As he said,“ the ideology in Nagarik, though
the metaphors of Ajantrik, turned upside down, through the prisms of consciousness
that dispersed and fragmented our vision, he (Ghatak) was looking for that integration
which he presented in Titash.” (page 233, The Shock of Desire and Others). In Titas, he
focuses on female fertility with an erotic impulse through the RajarJhi and Basanti
characters. Which is different from Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara, where Nita gave her
everything without receiving anything, in Titas the women figures are more powerful
with voicing their desires. Where men and women are projected equally and side by
side. Ghatak develops the feminine through a montage sequence showing us the origin
dialectics of nature: the mother-goddess as the source of fertility. The mother goddess
“Ma Bhagwati” is at the centre of the fertility cult of the ethnic-social community. Ghatak
uses a certain profile of the face for Basanti and RajarJhi – the oval shaped portrait
associated with the visual iconography of the mother-goddess – in Titas. Since these
these Gods belong to sects of folk culture, and not a specific religion, they are not
unapproachable imaginary figures, but situated in the twilight zone of the mystical and
everyday reality. As a result, Ghatak usually deploys classical religious names as his
character names and presents them as ordinary, realistic beings. Uncharacteristically
however, he did not use these religious names for any characters in Titas. What I
believe is that he did not feel that there is any need because the living tradition inside
the Malo community itself has this realistic thinking about God and Goddess in their
subconscious mind. But in his other films, he had to use these types of names to
compare religious beliefs with modernity and realism. Where the archetype ends and
the myth makes their original amplification.
This great Mother is still hunting the consciousness of the people,and RajarJhi in Titas
is unconsciously creating and perpetuating this archetype

Ghatak once said, “A man enjoys rasa depending on his capability of imbibing rasa.” Ira
Bhaskar explains this in her “Myth and Ritual in Meghe Dhaka Tara” article. She
explains at the primary level in films there may be a story of laughter and tears of joy
and sorrow, but if we go deeper we find political and social implications; deeper still, we
will find the directions depending on the philosophy and the consciousness of the artist,
and even deeper, temporal feelings that cannot be expressed in words. In Titas,
Ananto’s mother RajharJhi is introduced as Maa Bhagwati: in Hindu religion this name
also associated to God/Goddess Durga/ Parvati. And this specific Goddes symbolized
as a figure of sacrifice to human desire and aspiration. Where RajharJhi and Basonti
both sacrifice their lives to the Malo community. Where Ananto’s mother accepts her
fate and tries to find her husband for the sake of her children and dies with the certain
shock of her husband’s death on the banks of the river Titas, where she had got a
second lease of life. On the other hand, Basanti sacrifices her motherhood for
marinating the rules of the society. These two figure from Titas and Nita from “Meghe
Dhaka Tara” are very similar to each other. Where Nita sacrifices everything to build up
her family; Rajar Jhi and Basanti also sacrifice themselves to maintain the flows of life
for their ethnic community. Their fertility, and desires, finally have to be sublimated in
the ebbs and flows of time and the river landscape.

The last episode of the film “A River Called Titas” develops the rise of the bourgeois
upper caste community that will rule over theMalo community, which will lead the
audience the unacceptance emotions and on the other side two specific characters
become the figure of justice against all these evil forces. Both Basanti and Ramprashad
represent symbolic figures from their position. Basanti, who is from the Malo community,
stands against all injustices and criticises her community, realizing how these bourgeois
rulers are successful with their plan to take control by interrupting the cultural traditions
and community fabric of the Malos. First, these upper caste rulers import the urban
entertainment form “Jatra” into the Malo community, and second they give them loans
with a high rate of interest. As a result, the Malos get involved with entertainment and
forget about their responsibility for their community. It is Basanti who fights by herself
against this evil force but fails to able to succeed. On the other hand, Ramprashad, who
is not a Malo but a respected man in the farmer’s community, stands against the
colonial legal and education system. He fights against the corruption of the imperial
system of justice and bourgeois society, successfully beating them. Ghatak deliberately
juxtaposes these two different sequences back to back and develops the relationship
between Basanti and Ramprashad, who live in different villages, to think through the
fate of this whole landscape. This analysis leads me to a different conclusion about the
ending sequence where Basonti died on the dry bed of the Titas river. Ramprashad’s
prediction of the death of the Titash river comes true. Just like he had once said to the
young Basanti, there may not even be a single drop of water left in the river for drinking,
to sustain life. Though Basanti is given river water to drink (a Hindu rite of passage into
death), she can’t drink it: it falls to and is soaked up by the dry land again. But before
she dies, she get a mysterious vision of a child running between a paddy field. Which
symbolizes the rise of the farmer's community on this land. Which lead us to the idea of
hope: after the destruction of a society, a living tradition, there begins another
community to fight back these evil force and establish the land of justice.

Like in his most of the films, Ghatak used highly composed frames, meaningful use of
music and sound, and above all a highly unfamiliar editing style. Charles Tesson (2011)
has spoken of a ‘mise en scene program’ in Ghatak which, as Raymond Bellour (2004)
remarks, is ‘founded on loss, shock,and separation: in short, the unacceptable.’ And to
do this kind of narrative style, Ghatak creatively follows Eisenstein. In every sequence
and frame with theatrical compositions of the subjects, he maintains his iconic visual
narrative. One of the common thing in all of his film is an energetic montage. Which I
think is very much different than the silent era or the classical Hollywood era. His style
of Montage is mainly symbolic and structural narrative montage, not just between
scenes but within each scene, from one shot to the next. Besides, to break the circle of
traditional modernist filmmaking after the modern classical era, Ritwik had to stand with
something which belongs to this land. As the film media introduced by the western
community, Ritwik’s philosophy about using cinema as a media was to use this as a
communication tool; since he found it more communicative than theater. Given a better
media than cinema, he claimed that he would not have any doubt to shift to that form.
We can identify his film as experimental work, but this experiment brought us a new
type of filmmaking in Indian art cinema genre. He tried to develop a style of making film
blending with a western and eastern kind of art. For this, he prefers primitive culture
more than any religious or classical literature. Primitive culture represents the folk
culture, and the belief system in folk culture suffused with myth. So there is always a
significant use of mythical representation in his film which leads a vibrant and greater
energy by creating a scientific invention of reality.

Adrian Martin in his “Five minutes and Fifteen Seconds with Ritwik Ghatak” tries to pose
the question, what is the most artistic vision in cinema? He argues that it is not only
drama or character but equally or even more the emotional, dynamic power of
abstraction, the materiality of the total event which develops a film. So following his
arguments, the purpose of making a film is not for only to passively lay out in the mise
en scene the subjectivity of a matter, but also to give it a form and shape. In this
phenomenon, cinema theorist and critic Raymond Bellour recognizes how cinema as a
media works with multiple and heterogeneous objectives from the beginnings of early
cinema to the classical periods. Which tries to open every kind of fluctuation and fold
through the mise en scene. But under the pressures of modern cinema, the process of
folding get more or less absorbed and dissolves. So the term radical modernism has
been introduced with Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Antonioni’s
L’avventura (1960) and from a very few people in India, RitwikGhatak’s “A River Called
Titas” (1973).
The mythical power of representing the historical events within a narrative structure is
developed by Ghatak. And one characteristic of his film is apparent that the tragic forms
of his narrative style are neither realistic nor melodramatic. In his point of view, the
separation into art film as realism and commercial films as melodrama is untenable;
which makes him different from most other directors from India, even Ray. His own
traumatic experience of Bengali partition history and political activities with IPTA (Indian
People’s Theatre Association) leads him to develop a style of filmmaking which breaks
all the usual definitions of filmmaking. Although he never achieved much more popular
in his lifetime, his films grew popular around 1980’s with film society movement all
around India. He formed an attachment to the theories of Bertolt Brecht, and like Brecht,
Ghatak promoted both emotional involvement and analytical distance on the spectator’s
part in a seesawing, dialectical movement. However, “A River Called Titas” from its
opening sequence plaintively informs us about the Bengali’s turbulent history through
the colonial periods and the partitions. Besides, all over the film, he tries to bring out the
past cultural archetypes to its audience by using melodramatic forms, like suffering
mother. The wise old man, local gossips, separation, protest and twist narrative
conventions. Break this exaggerated style of presentation by Brechtian style of non-
linear narrative flow, montage editing where every frame, characters and the elements
linked with each other, overall use of myth and ritual concept and poetic gesture which
is an uncommon technique in world cinema of all time.
“BFI | Features | South Asian Cinema | A Guide to South Asian Cinema | 50 Essential South Asian Films | Top
10 Bangladeshi Films | Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973).” 2009. January 15, 2009.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090115123408/http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/imagineasia/guide/poll/
bangladesh/01_titash.html.

Cooke, Lez. 2013. Style in British Television Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

“Healing the Rupture_ The Influence of Eisenstein on the Work of Ritwik Ghatak”

“Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak.” n.d. Accessed May 6, 2018.
http://www.rouge.com.au/3/ghatak.html.

Martin, Adrian. n.d. “A River Called Titas: River of No Return.” The Criterion Collection. Accessed May 6,
2018a. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2990-a-river-called-titas-river-of-no-return.

———. n.d. “A River Called Titas: River of No Return.” The Criterion Collection. Accessed May 8, 2018b.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2990-a-river-called-titas-river-of-no-return.

“Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.” 2014. October 10, 2014.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141010152617/http://www.tcm.com/this-
month/article/941478%7c0/Martin-Scorsese-s-World-Cinema-Project.html.

“Myth and Ritual in Meghe Dhaka Tara - Ira Bhaskar” n.d.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. n.d. “RITWIK GHATAK A RETURN TO THE EPIC,” 75.

“Ritwik Ghatak: Reinventing the Cinema | Jonathan Rosenbaum.” n.d. Accessed May 8, 2018.
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2017/08/ritwik-ghatak-reinventing-the-cinema/.

Street, Bankim Chatterjee. n.d. “RITWIK MEMORIAL TRUST 1/10 Prince Golam Mohd Road Calcutta-700 026,”
150.

“ছায়াছবি : তিতাস একটি নদীর নাম - বায়োস্কোপ ব্লগ : বায়োস্কোপ ব্লগ | মুভি-সিনেমা-চলচিত্র.” n.d. Accessed May 5,
2018. http://bioscopeblog.net/taieen/27651.

“তিতাস-এর ৪০ বছর ও একজন ঋত্বিক : একটি পুনর্মূল্যায়ন  »  ক্যাটাগরী » ম্যাজিক লণ্ঠন.” n.d. Accessed May 5,
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